Monday, July 30, 2012

I've been recently added to a group that is all about tutorials (we can't get enough of them!) and even if a lot of the tutorials there are for sale, there are also free tutes for people to practice and learn from. One of them is a tutorial posted by Claire Wallis who is a bangle-crazy self-taught artist. She has such an eye for detail and color!

Yummy stuff right? She came up with a tutorial on how to make knitted polymer clay and I wanted to make a necklace using this technique for my cousin who recently gave birth. My cousin loves to knit and I came up with a quick and easy necklace she could hang wherever for her baby.

What do you think? I tried passing the clay through an extruder but the strips would come out all jagged no matter how many times I conditioned the clay so I manually rolled each and every snake. I hope it's something she will like :)

Thursday, July 26, 2012

OMG. It's astonishing to note that tonight, I have time to post a blog. Three months after I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl - here I am, still unable to establish a routine. Since I am a creature of habit, I love scheduling and organizing things so you can pretty much imagine how different and difficult things are with the baby!

Before I tell you about how much Zoe has grown these past weeks, I want to recount my labor and delivery experience (don't worry, I won't go into the gory details!). I was well into my 39th week of pregnancy and was feeling super impatient! A lot of my classmates in my childbirth class had already given birth and I could feel the weight (literally!) of my impending delivery. I thought I had about a week left but around 11pm on April 24 my water bag broke! We rushed to our hospital, found out our OB-Gyn was out of town and that I was only about 2cm dilated. Meaning it was going to be a long wait.

I had been planning an all-natural delivery (that's why we took classes!) but by 4cm, I was begging for an epidural. The pain was intense! It was like pressure filling every nook and cranny of my stomach to the point where I couldn't breathe. They gave me the epidural at 6cm, this was around 7am the following day, what a relief! Getting to 10cm was easier after the shot and after 17 hours of labor, I pushed out a healthy baby girl :)

I was so fortunate that the doctor who delivered my baby was super nice and she was also the head of the Ultrasound department so I knew her from those times when I went for an ultrasound. Dr. Acu allowed my husband inside the delivery room and she even let him cut the umbilical cord! He was the first one to see Zoe and was there when the nurses put the baby on my chest. I felt so lucky because this was not usually done and the moment was just absolutely magical.

The whole labor and delivery process was not as easy as I thought it would be and I cannot imagine what it must have been like in the old days when there was no anesthesia or doctors! Honestly, it will be a while before I seriously consider having another baby, but that moment when they place your baby on your chest, when you hear her cry that first time and when you see her little pink face, it is true what they say, all that pain, all those hours - she was all worth it :)

About Me

I am the mother of two beautiful little girls who often exasperate, delight, and tire me out! Being a parent (and a working one at that) can be quite daunting but also very rewarding. Here, I write about my parenting 'experiments' and observations, some tips and 'life hacks' I have picked up over the years and more.
Posts on the other love of my life, baking, can be found on onenuttybaker.blogspot.com